Broadband Developments

I cornered Doug Gourlay Senior Director of Product Marketing of Cisco’s Datacenter Business Unit, at the Infrastructure 2.0 event to answer my question about what he means when he says “The Modernization of the Datacenter”.

Question (John Furrier): What do you say to all the skeptics who say that you’re promoting the modernization of the datacenter because you’re in that business and that it really isn’t a problem? Is this just virtualization or is there another issue?

Answer (Doug Gourlay): It’s absolutely a systems approach. There are multiple factors. Lets take Moore’s law for instance which has proven true over the past 30 years. In datacenters you want it to last at least 10 -15 yrs. With 750x processor improvements under Moore’s law in the last 12 years yet cooling efficiencies has only grown 64x for IT assets - that is an 11 or 12x disparity. That’s why you see datacenters with racks designed to cool 4000 to 6000 watts. If I took a set of blades today I would need to cool it with only 30,000 watts. The reality is that we can draw more power then we can efficiently cool today. You either run out of space so — we made denser equipment; you ran out of cooling capacity — you bought more crack units; you ran out of power and the power company will NOT give you more. So when we talk about a modernization were talking about the underlying physical facilities that we built are being obsoleted almost every 5 yrs.

Question (John Furrier): It’s not just a Cisco issue it’s more of an environmental issue around the datacenter themselves ..the raw infrastructure the physical plant or whatever to equipment.

Answer (Doug Gourlay): That’s the biggest compelling event. how do i enable the IT infrastructure to make that facility infrastructure last longer.

To View the Entire Infrastructure 2.0 video feed click here (sorry registration required).

I had a chance to meet with Doug Gourlay, Senior Director of Cisco’s Datacenter Business Unit, to ask him about what he thinks of Infrastructure 2.0.

Very interesting response.  I have a few more segments:  Modernization of the Data Center and What Cisco thinks of the phrase “Moving up the stack”.

To view the entire Cisco event in video you can go here - Click here for the Cisco Infrastructure 2.0 event.

Enjoy the video (less than 2 mins).

At the UC Summit 2008 I sat down with Eric Swift to discuss Microsoft’s Unified Communications Story. He talks about what is UC, trends, drives in adoption, and Microsoft’s secret sauce on UC.

On another post I had his answer to my question on “How will Microsoft Compete with Google in the Enterprise?” - click here to see that interview

Here is my conversation with Eric Swift.

At the UC Summit 2008 put on my UCStrategies I sat down with Eric Swift to talk about Microsoft and Unified Communications. Full interview coming up soon. However, I wanted to provide this snip of Eric’s conversation on Unified Communications and the threat of Google. I asked the question that everyone wants to know. How is Microsoft going to compete with Google. Eric gives a great answer without directly dissing Google.

If you digg into his interview you can see the battle lines being drawn between Microsoft’s vision of Unified Communications and Google’s ‘quiet’ moves into the space. However the stakes are increasing as Google announced this week their partnership with Salesforce.com. It’s clear Google is changine the game on Unified Communication market but vectoring in from another direction - hosted web services. I think Google has a great strategy but Microsoft is so well positioned to crush them. We’ll see.

Enjoy the conversation with Eric. Here is the video of me and Eric